On his book The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey
Cover Interview of July 07, 2021
The wide angle
Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this
project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants
of Doubt, their account of organized science deniers who attack everything
from climate data to vaccine schedules. Little did I (or even they) know how
much worse things were going to get over the next decade.
By the time I sat down to write the book, we had entered the
age of “alternative facts”; and when it was published four years later, both
the pandemic and QAnon were in full-swing.
The distrust and polarization we’re seeing in 2021—with
conspiracy theorists in Congress and politicians running on internet rumors,
rather than running away from them—makes the tight-knit world of Merchants
of Doubt seem almost quaint.
If relevance can be accidental, it can also be regrettable.
Like many people, I wish we weren’t in the middle of a crisis of expertise—but
here we are.
As a kind of “pre-history” of the scientific method, my book
can’t tell you when the scientific method is being invoked properly or how
better to wield it. Instead, the book ends with a question: what if pointing to
a special method as the guarantor of scientific expertise is doing more harm
than good?
The book hints at an answer by describing a different path.
Most of the scientists I write about were interested in how science shades
imperceptibly into other kinds of problem-solving. Their work didn’t lead to
cynical conclusions about trust or truth, however. It simply insisted that
science was a part of the world, an elaborate version of something that should
be familiar to everyone.
Or at least, that was the idea.
In the end, as the book shows, that wasn’t the model of
science and science’s publics that took shape in the twentieth century. For
better and for worse, science came to seem like something that happened behind
closed doors.
Distance has its benefits, especially when the process needs
to be shielded from interference. But I argue that distance has its downsides,
too. Most people don’t know how science actually gets done, which puts a
premium on both media representations and the idea of a single method. What
would happen if we closed the gap a little?
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants of Doubt, their account of organized science deniers who attack everything from climate data to vaccine schedules. Little did I (or even they) know how much worse things were going to get over the next decade.
By the time I sat down to write the book, we had entered the age of “alternative facts”; and when it was published four years later, both the pandemic and QAnon were in full-swing.
The distrust and polarization we’re seeing in 2021—with conspiracy theorists in Congress and politicians running on internet rumors, rather than running away from them—makes the tight-knit world of Merchants of Doubt seem almost quaint.
If relevance can be accidental, it can also be regrettable. Like many people, I wish we weren’t in the middle of a crisis of expertise—but here we are.
As a kind of “pre-history” of the scientific method, my book can’t tell you when the scientific method is being invoked properly or how better to wield it. Instead, the book ends with a question: what if pointing to a special method as the guarantor of scientific expertise is doing more harm than good?
The book hints at an answer by describing a different path. Most of the scientists I write about were interested in how science shades imperceptibly into other kinds of problem-solving. Their work didn’t lead to cynical conclusions about trust or truth, however. It simply insisted that science was a part of the world, an elaborate version of something that should be familiar to everyone.
Or at least, that was the idea.
In the end, as the book shows, that wasn’t the model of science and science’s publics that took shape in the twentieth century. For better and for worse, science came to seem like something that happened behind closed doors.
Distance has its benefits, especially when the process needs to be shielded from interference. But I argue that distance has its downsides, too. Most people don’t know how science actually gets done, which puts a premium on both media representations and the idea of a single method. What would happen if we closed the gap a little?